Migrating from Eudora to Thunderbird

Eudora was a popular email client for quite awhile and considered by many as more secure than MS Outlook (we're talking back before webmail was popular here). Unfortunately it isn't being maintained anymore and the free version lacks some (now) pretty basic features which are nice to have (spell checker, PGP support, gmailish fancy labels). Thunderbird on the other hand is actively updated, feature rich and open source. The trouble comes in when you try to migrate your old mail to Thunderbird. The Thunderbird importer for Eudroa's data doesn't always get the read/unread status of messages correct (and can mangle some messages). The workaround for this is to use a free tool called Eudora Rescue to preprocess your mailbox files. The developers have some instructions for doing the conversion but the basic strategy is to first backup your Eudora install, then run Eudora Rescue on it (I enabled just about all the options, but the defaults probably work in most cases). You then rename your old Eudora directory and move the processed mailbox files into a new directory in place of the old Eudora directory (same name/location). Copy your attachments directory ("[EudroaDirectory]\Attached" by default) into the new. You can then install Thunderbird and let it automatically import Eudora's mail. If desired you can then put your old Eudora directory back and import your Eudora address book/settings from the Thunderbird tools menu.

If you have trouble with the address book importer (can happen depending on your Eudora version and settings) I've had good luck with allowing the Windows address book to import from Eudora and then exporting from that to a format that you can import from Thunderbird (csv works).

You can also install a Thunderbird extension called Penelope which will change Thunderbird's UI to look more like Eudora. It's a relativly new project but it does seem to work ok (read more).

Unfortunatly, I haven't found anyway to import filters from Eudora (I just copied them by hand)